If you squeeze a body enough, apart from the mounting pain, bones break, and eventually, blood comes out. Does the state of Israel expect Palestinians to remain helots for eternity? Are we all blinded by the light of unrelenting media images of horror and mass destruction? I am, of course referring to the programmed genocide presently occurring in Gaza in response to the military excursion into Israel and the killing of civilians by the armed forces of the authoritarian and radical Islamic organisation Hamas.

Beyond the spiralling newspeak of Occidental political institutions and media, we are called upon to disapprove of terrorism but not to understand it. It was also a label applied by the British authorities in Palestine to future political leaders of the Jewish state. Its shifting significance from the women carrying bombs in their baskets and bags into the European quarters of Algiers to the jailbreak and massacre perpetuated by Hamas suggests a history rather than merely an abominable event. In Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, we see a captured leader of the FLN being asked by European journalists the reason for their terrorist attacks. The arrested leader Larbi Ben M’hidi, replies that if the French were to give the FLN tanks, planes and weapons, they would fight a conventional war. Asymmetrical relations of power, both military and political, characterise all resistance movements in their struggle for survival. And the turn to armed struggle is dictated by circumstances. When the Portuguese government refused to listen to Frelimo, the MPLA and Amilcar Cabral, then the resistance to colonialism in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau had little option. Perhaps we should also recall the Tunisian Jewish writer and critic Albert Memmi’s observation in The Coloniser and the Colonized that colonialism is a variety of fascism. The 75 years since the foundation of the state of Israel have witnessed the constant colonisation of Palestine, brutally tearing away from its autochthonous inhabitant’s territory and lives. Israel, as the outreach of European guilt and power, as reparation for the Shoah and an exercise in Occidental colonialism, raises far deeper questions than the ready labels of terrorism and war in the Middle East are able to accommodate.

The geopolitics that permits certain powers to be exercised and others to be marginalised and crushed is not only the empirical evidence of asymmetrical powers; it further reveals the script and location of those writing and defining the narrative. It is precisely here that Zionism dovetails with the colonial constitution of the modern world. If Israel is geographically not in the West, it is historically, politically and culturally of the West. This raises the question of the Occident, and not simply Germany, needing to transform guilt for the Shoah into the altogether more arduous political and cultural task of taking responsibility for the genocidal formation of modernity: from the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania to the European Holocaust. This counter-narrative, already rehearsed by Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire, draws us into deeper temporalities and structural powers. Here, the contemporary and historical evidence that some lives count for more than others continually reveals the racial disposition of our colonial constitution. To recognise this heart of darkness and our responsibility in producing the resistance to our colonial intentions leading to the brutal and fundamentalist response of Hamas is not to justify it. Rather, it is to begin to understand that it is not so much ‘them’ but us who have produced the world that bears witness to the atrocities being perpetuated in Palestine by the coloniser. Elsewhere, in the struggles over indigenous rights in Latin America and Australia and in the postcolonial exit being practised in South Africa, where the racial order of a colonial apparatus of apartheid is being dismantled, guilt is reworked into responsibility. It demonstrates that the present Occidental template of white supremacy doesn’t necessarily have the final word.

An Italian version of this text was previously published at Il Manifesto: https://ilmanifesto.it/il-cuore-nero-delloccidente-coloniale?fbclid=IwAR2a9XCum__eJo4BjidL6g4EfrwhxUNE-2E2e06lyaBs4IncawA-LHhpKHI

Iain Chambers is a writer and independent scholar. He previously taught Cultural, Postcolonial and Mediterranean Studies at the Oriental University in Naples, where he was director of the doctoral programme in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies in the Anglophone world. His research work is in different fields, including migration, music and the phenomena of identity in the Mediterranean. He is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Cultural Studies, Media & Philosophy and Postcolonial Studies and he is author, inter alia, of the books Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Duke University Press, 2008).